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Tangent: What a shock, paying for health care for people who are here illegally is a really bad financial idea https://redstate.com/wardclark/2025/03/13/medi-cal-fail-providing-health-care-for-illegal-aliens-is-breaking-the-program-n2186631

You forgot: 1a. Manipulate slides to make it look like everything is green by lying/changing denominator to get boss promoted

Standard playbook across the force for the last 20+ years... 1. Cut to the bone. 2. Demand Congress pay for newer and more expensive toys since you're now below critical capability and stalling. 3. Get denied. 4. Act surprised. Gnash teeth and tear garments at AFA. 5. Get promoted. 6. It's somebody else's problem. Return to step 1.

I don't think anyone is against legal immigrants, as noted this country was built on their labor which continues to this day. And I work on the south side of San Antonio, which for all intents and purposes is tantamount to being in Mexico. Folks are relatively friendly here as well, but there's also a fair amount of crime, gangs, drugs, etc. as compared with other parts of the city. I know we've discussed the impact of illegal immigrants ad nauseam, but here are some facts from a January 2024 Congressional report (cited below) that put it into true perspective... The average fiscal impact of an illegal immigrant is estimated to be around $68,000 over their lifetime, and in 2023, the total cost of illegal immigration to U.S. taxpayers was estimated at $150.7 billion, with the average taxpayer contributing approximately $1,156. More details... The current surge of illegal immigration is unprecedented. Some 2.7 million inadmissible aliens have been released into the country by the administration since January 2021. There have also been 1.5 million “got-aways” — individuals observed entering illegally but not stopped. Visa overstays also seem to have hit a record in FY 2022. We preliminarily estimate that the illegal immigrant population grew to 12.8 million by October of 2023, up 2.6 million since January 2021, when the president (Biden) took office. This is the net increase in the illegal population based on monthly Census Bureau data, not the number of new arrivals. Illegal immigrants have a negative fiscal impact -- taxes paid minus benefits received -- primarily because a large share have modest levels of education, resulting in relatively low average incomes and tax payments, along with significant use of means-tested programs and other government services. Illegal immigrants can receive welfare on behalf of U.S.-born children. Also, illegal immigrant children can receive school lunch/breakfast and WIC directly. A number of states provide Medicaid to some illegal immigrants, and a few provide SNAP. Several million illegal immigrants also have work authorization (e.g. DACA, TPS and some asylum applicants), allowing receipt of the EITC. The high welfare use of illegal immigrant households is not explained by an unwillingness to work. In fact, 94 percent of illegal immigrant households have at least one worker, compared to only 73 percent of U.S.-born households. But the nation’s welfare system is designed to help low-wage workers with children, which describes a very large share of illegal immigrant households. In addition to consuming welfare, illegal immigration makes significant use of public education. Based on average costs per student, the estimated 4 million children of illegal immigrants in public schools created $68.1 billion in costs in 2019. The vast majority of these children are U.S.-born. Use of emergency medical services is another area in which illegal immigrants create significant fiscal costs. Prior research indicates that there are 5.8 million uninsured illegal immigrants in the country in 2019, accounting for a little over one-fifth of the total population without health insurance. The costs of providing care to them likely totals some $7 billion annually. Illegal immigrants do pay some taxes. We estimate that illegal immigrants in 2019 paid roughly $5.9 billion in federal income tax, $16.2 billion in Social Security tax and $3.8 billion in Medicaid taxes. However, as the net fiscal drain of $68,000 per person cited above indicates, these taxes are not nearly enough to cover the cost of the services they receive. Illegal immigrants do add perhaps $321 billion to the nation’s GDP, but this is not a measure of their tax contributions or the benefits they create for the U.S.-born. Almost all the increase in economic activity goes to the illegal immigrants themselves in the form of wages. Source: HHRG-118-JU01-Wstate-CamarotaS-20240111.pdf

Whatever you all do....panic because the sky is most certainly falling. But seriously, this is why you never budget based on getting premium flying every month. Best to be good with min guarantee, better if you're below that. It's already been a good year so far on reserve, might be a good year to keep riding the reserve train. I'm just excited that I'll be able to drop a bunch of my summer schedule as I have way too many plans this summer. Someone certainly knew that DAL was about to make an announcement. I saw a post on X showing someone massively shorted DAL just before the announcement, then cashed out the next morning. Main millions for a few clicks. It's good to have insider info, especially if you have a few degrees of separation.

If Congress doesn't fix the U-2 divestment really soon, this will likely be the last Beale Airshow with a U-2 flying. Lineup is coming along well, to include TBirds, F-18 TACDEMO, USMC Osprey Demo, C-17/KC-135 Demo, Aarron Deliu, T-33 Demo, Vicky Benzing If interested in bringing a static to the party, drop me a note. It should be a large time.

I wonder if folks are still getting put into the 2.5 classes. Apparently Laughlin is moving to IPT format this summer and Vance in the fall… but that is when people would in process at those bases from what I’ve been told. IPT is about 5 months long, so that would put the first T-6 IPT class at Laughlin starting around Jan 2026 and April-ish for Vance. There will certainly be classes starting between now and then following the old syllabus, so that leads me to believe quite a few of us will get the old syllabus. Thoughts?

Very good post and thank you for sharing that report. I can only speak for myself, but I'm actually in favor of pausing most forms of legal immigration for some time while we try to sort out our domestic affairs. US immigration policy has historically been about keeping our doors shut and only opening them to newcomers when we need them. The four major influxes of people into the US occurred during the Colonial Era, the Civil War, the Ellis Island era, and now the floodgates have basically been open since 1965. We used to have a robust national quota system which ensured the country wouldn't be inundated with people from nations whose culture and values are radically different from our own, but this was removed by the Hart-Celler Act in 1965. And of course, regardless of where people are coming from, the expectation used to be that immigrants would assimilate completely (e.g., learn English, change their names, refuse to teach their children their native language or speak it in public, etc.) I also want to push back a bit on the traditional narrative of America being "built by immigrants", maybe you can give me your thoughts on it. To me, America was built by settler-colonialists, pioneers, and frontiersmen; The kinds of people who turned a vast, empty, and dangerous swath of land into a prosperous and functioning modern civilization in record time, on par with anything found in the Old World. It always irks me a bit when today's immigrants, both legal and illegal, are compared to those founding settlers, as if hopping on a plane and going to your new H1B job at Microsoft or crossing the Rio Grande and receiving government handouts is comparable to what newcomers used to have to go through. Maybe it's just the modern connotations of the word "immigrant" that I find objectionable. Still, it's undeniable that many people contributed to the success of our country.

I know I'm one of the few liberals on here, but if you watch what Portland does to the rest of Oregon, it's the same thing. "We want a high speed rail line from the rich part of town to downtown Portland." Rest of OR - "WTF, no." Portland (and the leftists): "Too bad, it's green so here's a state tax on it." I don't have time to read the article, plus I'd need to find something on the other side and/or more balanced, but paying for illegal adults who aren't enrolled in some kind of citizenship program and making progress on it...wtf? Doubly so if they're getting paid in cash so those taxes don't even get to come out. I say all that and I was stationed at Vandenberg and had an apartment right across the street from the strawberry fields in Santa Maria. I'd wake up when those dudes had been out there for hours and watch them run to pick fruit. Hardest working people I've ever seen in my life. I was in little Mexico (west side of town) and never had any issues. Even the roughest looking punks were generally nice. Lots of families in my area. YMMV.

he's a good guy IRL wish he wouldn't have left. we disagreed, but the debate was fun.

This guy gets it. Yep. The other dimension here is that increased demand for housing - through artificially increasing the population - places downward pressure on wages. This effect is across ALL jobs. ALL careers. Not just menial, day-labor type employment. So not only does the cost of available housing increase, the amount of work required to net yourself housing goes up also, driving a further divide. For everyone. We (still) haven't fully flushed out the recession from 2008, and all these present effects are still downstream from that and now all the COVID spending too. Banks withheld housing after the crash, lest they really get caught holding the bag. Post 2008, banks stopped foreclosing on certain delinquent mortgages. In 2019, some people saw this coming: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-bubble-era-home-mortgages-are-a-disaster-waiting-to-happen-2019-02-25 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-bubble-era-mortgage-trick-could-smash-major-us-housing-markets-2019-03-18 In 2024 some of these mortgages are now coming back to bite: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zombie-mortgages-debt-haunt-homeowners/ All that cash which should have been collected from people who "spent" that money on housing found its way into other parts of the economy, instead. Personally, I don't have any questions on why the price of stuff is so high. We injected fake dollars into the system during the run-up to 2008, and we did it again during COVID. When you mainline billions upon trillions of dollars into the economy without concurrent economic productivity to absorb those dollars, you get what we have now. It's simple arithmetic. It sucks that there will be pain, but we're not choosing this course presently. We made this choice a long, long time ago, and much like global warming, much of it is baked in at this point. We kicked the can in '08. We kicked it again in '20. We're eventually going to have to pay the piper, and the sooner, the better. @Negatory, I think you're mistaking a desire for austerity, with folks' acceptance that the cure is going to be painful.

So in 2019, Dems said the Trump economy was due to Obama, but less than two months in, this is all on Trump…which is it? Honest question.

The music always stops for a while. Like the Boy Scouts say: Be Prepared.

The issue with the A-380 in the Cargo world (Fed-Ex/Ups) was twofold. It was going to take many years for Airbus to develope the freighter version, and the added weight of strengthening the floors to handle cargo made the jet unprofitable. A 777 Or MD-11 was a lot more profitable. Also the specialized equipment for loading a double decker was problematic too.

"You see brue roof?" "Yes, I see 1000 blue roofs." "Ughhhh....brue roof not your targhet."

Thanks for posting the chart . Note that all altitudes are specified as MSl. To me this whole airspace design was normalized deviance . This crash was baked right into the airspace design. if this event had gone perfectly the airliner could have passed 125 feet over the helicopter. That is insane and would be a reportable near miss anywhere else.